Question about performace in hubs and a fix

[igotthecrabs]

Im only in the Santa Monica area and usually outside i get about 15-18fps but when it rains it goes to about 6-10.

1. Can anyone find out a way to disable the rain in the game?

2. Is there any other areas in the entire game that will have worse lag than the santa monic hubs?

 

[Dragoro]

I hear downtown can be worse, I havent got that far yet, so I cant say for sure.

 

[Evil One]

Yeah, that's one thing I don't like, there are no advanced video options...all you can do is choose the resolution.

The worst area for me in Santa Monica was the beach (especially when it was raining).

Downtown was better than Santa Monica for me.

Hollywood can be graphically demanding. Haven't made it to Chinatown yet, so I don't know if it's bad as well or not.

 

[BLOODYTHING]

isnt there a disable enviroment effects in options

 

[urban]

i wanna find one too, indoors its fine, its just santa monica start main street thats really bad, its weird cause i can play half life 2 at 1024 with 60fps...

bizarre its like they fooked the engine to make it worse

 

[Wendigo777]

Ok, here's my observation and what I've done to "fix" the problem....sort of. It works, but it ain't pretty.

The number one problem I've noticed in the hubs isn't video ( even though it can be kind of harsh), it's audio. And, it's not a Vampire problem...it's an HL2 engine problem.

The ambient noise ( cars honking, rain falling, etc) REALLY wants to be going. You can bind a key to "stopsound" to make it go away ( just like in Counter Strike) and it'll help until the ambient noise tries to come back...which in some cases is less than a second.

Unlike Counter Strike, when you hit "stopsound", the background noise bogs you down and freezes you up big time.

What I've done is to add the command "stopsound" to my movement keys. As an example, bind w "+forward: stopsound"...that way, whenever I'm moving, it kills the background noise. Sometimes. I still have to use the regular stopsound key when the level is loading ( bind f5 "stopsound"), and it still loads slower than crap.

I just finished Downtown, and it took me forever...not because the missions were difficult ( and they were, actually) but because it took 10-15 minutes to load the hub sometimes. I don't know what to do about that.

I suggest reading some of these post here, and some over at Activision's site. There are some settings you can try that will help.

One thing I did notice was setting my desktop to 800x600 really did make a difference...so there's a bug that'll need to get patched and soon.

Give it a shot, it couldn't hurt.

Oh, and be careful..stop hitting your directional key when you initiate a conversation with someone or you won't hear them.

 

[Evil One]

There is no disable environmental effects as far as I have seen. The only thing close to advanced video options that I've seen are things like lowering the particle effects for the disciplines and things like that would offer only a small increase in video performance. I just think that it's odd that you can't have lower quality models in the game and turn off environmental effects/rain and lower the reflectivity of the water.

Hmm...I haven't had any probs with the audio. My system is a P4 1.8, 778 Mb of PC800 DDR RAM, ASUS Radeon 9600XT, Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS. HL2 ran quite well (I ran it at 800x600 res with high quality everything and it only got bogged down at the beginning), and Bloodlines druns well too, until I get to certain areas (like the beach in Santa Monica, especially when it rains, and Hollywood, and inside the building at the end of the plaguebearer quest downtown after you go to the top of the stairs(then it clears up after you go down holes in the floor a couple of times), so, for me at least, it is graphics and the game itself. Because if it was the audio, it would be constant.

Also, my brother runs Bloodlines on an AMD Athalon XP3200+ Barton, 512 Mb Kingston PC2700 DDR RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro, and onboard audio for his MBoard(ABIT AN7-supports up to 5.1 surround) and Bloodlines runs much better on his rig than on mine, even though my audio card is much better than his.

I have heard that the source engine has an audio problem, but i haven't experienced it, nor has my brother.

 

[Hallo]

First of all, VmB doesnt use the same build of the engine as HL2. Secondly, there is a lot you can change graphics wise with console commands. I dont know if anyone has posted it here, but do a google and add some XP to yourself. =)

 

[Marius]

Yeah, that's one thing I don't like, there are no advanced video options...all you can do is choose the resolution.

Yeah, that pisses me off as I can only run VTMB on my laptop which has a 16:10 Aspect ratio.

I'd love to able to play at that ratio, as I can with Half Life 2